Why the Bat
by writerdragonfly
Summary: Frontotemporal dementia slowly seeps away at Claudia's mind. In the end, it's a mess of not knowing and fear and terror, sleepless nights and nightmares and mis-remembered things. Stiles remembers the night she died in slow motion. The way her hands shook as she held the gun, her teeth chattering as she shivered despite the heat of the house. Minor Sterek.


**_Author's Note: _**

_Um, I don't even know what this is. Sudden Stiles and his mom feels? Sudden Stiles and his dad feels? STILINSKI FAMILY FEELS?!_

_ALL THE STILES FEELS?!_

_Also, implied Sterek._

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><p>Frontotemporal dementia slowly seeps away at Claudia's mind. In the end, it's a mess of not knowing and fear and terror, sleepless nights and nightmares and mis-remembered things.<p>

Stiles remembers the night she died in slow motion.

The way her hands shook as she held the gun, her teeth chattering as she shivered despite the heat of the house.

The way the bang echoed in his ears and everything went tinny. Pressing little hands to her leg where she'd shot herself, the hallucination confusing her beyond measure.

Stiles remembers calling the ambulance and the paramedics bundling him up in a shock blanket and sitting with his chin on his knees, pressed as far back into the ambulance bench as he could, his eyes focusing on his mother's tired face.

She kept whispering his name on repeat until it no longer sounded like a name but a curse. Until it felt like an accusation._ If you had been a better son, you would have gotten the gun away from me. If you'd spoken up, this wouldn't have happened._

It said nothing for the fear and terror of the gun that was initially pointed at him. It said nothing about the words she'd spoken as he shook and tried to form words that came out as cries. _Who are you? Where's my son?_

The ambulance reaches their house five minutes after his call, eight minutes after the gun fired. Stiles is a shaking mass of terror when she codes out in the back of it as they scream into the ambulance bay, her last words an I love you to a son she nearly killed instead.

She never recovers.

Claudia dies there a few feet away from her son, two hours after they made cupcakes together on one of her good clear days. Twenty minutes after she thinks there is an intruder in the house and picks the lock on the gun safe in her husband's side of the closet. Twelve minutes after she shoots herself in the leg and nicks an artery.

Ten minutes before her husband knows something happened to her.

Stiles sits in the waiting room of the ER with a patient nurse he knows he knows but can't place, because every female face is his mother's, and no matter what they say he can hear her words "_tell my boy I love him,_" as if he's not there.

No matter what they say he can see her face as it goes slack. No matter what they say, he can still hear the machines as they screech about her death.

His mother is dead and he knows that she isn't coming back.

His father rushes in with blood on his uniform, immediately zeroing in on Stiles and the wipes Melissa McCall pulls away from his fingers. The wipes are pink, still wet blood clinging to them from Stiles' fingers. Stiles vaguely knows that the nurse had wanted him to wash his hands but he couldn't make himself move, couldn't make himself speak. Silent. Still.

His father checks him over first, pressing a few kisses to his forehead and the top of his head as he talks to the nurse. The kisses feel like a branding. _You should have stopped your mother._

His father crumbles when the weary doctor comes out of the trauma surgery, wearing bright blue scrubs that are too clean to be the ones he tried to save his mother with.

"I'm sorry. There was nothing we could do."

Nothing they could do, but Stiles could have. He should have. He knows this like he knows that Scott McCall is his best friend, like he knows that he wants Lydia Martin to be his wife one day, like he knows that he's hard to take care of because he can never sit still.

Stiles knows this more than he knows anything, and he doesn't expect that to change.

His mother dies in the back of an ambulance on a Sunday evening, thinking her son is a changeling who tried to take his place. She dies lost and confused and she must think she is alone, except for the paramedics.

There are two dozen half frosted cupcakes on the counter that stay there until Melissa McCall pushes her way into their house two weeks after the funeral that Stiles can't remember breathing at and seventeen days after his mother dies. Stiles picks one out of the trash afterward and notices the little speck of blood and throws up on the kitchen floor. He has the first panic attack he can remember being aware of right after.

Stiles loved his mother, even on her bad days. Even on the days where he had to call his dad home from work or ask if Scott's mom would pick him up to hang out with Scott and all of them would pretend that it was normal. That nothing was different, wrong.

Stiles loved his mother more than anything in the world, and his father probably just as much. He hates to see his father with his hand wrapped around a bottle, late at night, staring at a photo of his mother that didn't match the crying one she died as.

He thinks about killing himself, once. Until he remembers that as much as he doesn't deserve to live for not saving his mother, his father doesn't deserve to lose him too.

It takes two weeks, six days, twelve hours, and fourteen minutes before Stiles actually speaks again.

His father holds him so tightly that night that Stiles can barely breathe, but he doesn't complain. He sobs into his father's shoulder like he's even younger than he was three weeks ago.

Stiles refuses to answer by the name his mother whispered in the ambulance after that. He'd already been going by Stiles for a few years, only a few of his teachers and his mother had even attempted to keep it up, so it's not much different.

He also refuses to shut up. It's not like he was ever really quiet before, but people start to talk about it and he can hear their barbs and concern and teasing and outright cruelty. But he doesn't stop.

He stopped talking once, and the most important person in his life died. He has to remember that.

When he's sixteen, it's been long enough that he starts to forget. Not what happened, what he didn't do, what she said, and what he promised to himself afterward. But it starts to get easy to forget that he should be protecting his family.

Scott included.

Scott is bitten by a werewolf in the woods and Stiles has to deal with that guilt too. He has to protect his family in two worlds when he couldn't even manage to protect his mother in one.

Sometimes he lies awake at night, unable to sleep. He thinks about how hard the lies to his father are, how the words feel like glass crunching between his teeth. And he thinks about his mother, right before she pulled the trigger.

She called him a changeling, a beast trying disguise itself as her boy.

It's one of those nights that he presses the little green button to call, and waits until Derek, who he hardly knows, picks up the phone in a rushed breath.

_"Stiles? What happened?"_

"Are changelings real?"

"_What? It's like three in the morning!_" Derek growls out, and Stiles can't even feel guilty.

The weight hangs on his chest far too heavily to bear. Too heavily to pretend that he's okay, at this moment, right now.

"Please." It's the first time he's done this. Asked for something more with something less.

That's the second time that Derek breaks into his bedroom in the middle of the night, one of the only times he actually does it.

He sits on the edge of Stiles' bed next to him and waits until Stiles can manage to ask the question again, until he can stop looking at the glow in the dark stars tacked to his ceiling from a night so long ago that Stiles can hardly remember it outside his mother's soft huff of laughter and his father's full bodied chuckle.

"Are changelings real?" His voice catches on the end of it, but Derek doesn't comment.

"No. There's a lot of lore about what really happens to children, but my mom-" and it's Derek's turn to stumble on the words, but he doesn't pause more than a beat, "my mom said that fair folk would never do that to children."

"My mother called me a changeling. Right before she accidentally shot herself and died. She was crazy sometimes, but once werewolves were real..." Stiles doesn't say. But he wants to.

"Thanks."

The house is silent. His dad is working an overnight shift, and Stiles is responsibly in bed where he's been since twelve after ten. Derek Hale is sitting on his mattress, and they're both thinking about their mothers.

Stiles knows Derek feels just as responsible for his mother's death as Stiles does for his. He doesn't speak. Derek doesn't move. Not for a long time.

It's enough that Stiles falls asleep, reassured-mostly-that he's not a changeling. That he's just the son his mother didn't recognise and killed herself because of. At least he knows he's still her son.

They don't make a habit of late night phone calls and odd silent sharing of space. They don't magically fall in love and save the whole of Beacon Hills by the power of their relationship alone.

Stiles keeps lying to his father because he doesn't know how else he can protect him. And Derek makes mistakes but he doesn't stop trying.

The hallucination about his dad is too real to handle. His hands shake for days, and he has to tell his dad he thinks he took an extra Adderall when he can't drive to school.

When Gerard Argent beats the shit out of him, he almost hopes to die. But he doesn't. And he's glad he doesn't as soon as he sees his dad and the relief on his face. But it's a hollow happiness.

Stiles doesn't like to think about the fact that he knows the pass code to his father's gun safe. It's a lockbox in the spare bedroom inside a locked cabinet. He doesn't want inside it.

When his father finally knows the truth of werewolves, he tells Stiles to take a gun out if he goes out at night. To keep it under his passenger seat. Stiles says he will, but he never opens the safe. He can't.

He keeps a bat in his passenger seat though. It's metal, unlike the one that shattered in the hospital. It's his defense.

When the Nogitsune takes control, Stiles is terrified. He wants to scream. At first, it's not because he's in his body but because he knows the diagnosis. _Frontotemporal dementia_. He has what his mother nearly killed him for.

And then, the Nogitsune wears his body and Derek attacks him. But that's not what bothers him the most. No, it's the gun. He can feel the Nogitsune smirking in his head as the gun is pointed at him. As he can't help the whirring of his flashback to being just a kid and having his mother point a gun at him.

He can't help the panic that thrums through him, and keeps thinking of all the ways his dad is about to die.

When the Nogitsune spits him out, Stiles doesn't have time to think about it. Everything moves too fast. One minute, he's locked inside his own head and the next he's hardly alive anymore.

And the Nogitsune is locked away in a Nemeton case, to never be released.

It's the after that he has time to think.

There isn't a scar on his shin from where he fell on a school trip when he was eight and cut it open on a tree. There isn't a lot of scars anymore. There aren't any. He has no physical reminder of the time he and his mom were in a car accident when he was six and his arm got sliced open on the car door. He has no physical reminder on his shoulder where he'd gotten pierced by a werewolf claw. He has no reminder in the shape of a little white star on his head where Erica had hit him with a piece of the jeep.

He has no marks at all to say, this is who I am. These are the people that I was with when this happened.

In the end, maybe his mother saw the future. Maybe she saw that one day, he would be a changeling after all.

He sends Derek a text that says just that. It goes unanswered. He's too pissed that Derek doesn't respond, because he thought that Derek knew him that he doesn't realise until Scott gets worried what happened.

Stiles ends up pocketing Derek's abandoned phone and charges it up to find a text saved in the drafts.

_You're not a changeling. You were just given a second_

Maybe Derek knows him after all.

He deletes it.

Lydia asks him once, why he keeps a bat. He doesn't have a reason for it to be a bat, not really. But he has a reason for it to not be a gun.

Derek's the one that asks that, though. After he's learned to shoot, after his father gets him set up with a gun license, after he evolves.

"Why don't you use a gun? You'd be able to protect yourself so much better."

And Stiles can finally admit the answer.

_"When I was a kid, my mom got sick..."_

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><p><strong><em>Author's Note:<em>**

_This was supposed to be a three sentence head canon about why Stiles doesn't ask his father to borrow a gun. Hahahaha. Two and a half hours and like 2300 words later..._


End file.
